After the Fire Page 9

  “That’s why I’m pregnant,” Red said.

  “When?”

  “In about four and a half months.”

  “You’re going to do it all by yourself?” Karen asked.

  “Only way,” Red said. “Don’t you ever think about having a kid?”

  “I’m gay,” Karen said, surprised at how undefensively it came out.

  “I know,” Red said, “but that doesn’t make any difference.”

  “I suppose not,” Karen admitted, “but I haven’t thought about it since I was a kid myself and just assumed I’d have to. I don’t think I ever liked the idea.”

  “I don’t like the idea now,” Red granted. “But there’s no other way I’d get a baby.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Sometimes, a little bit, but mostly I think about how it will be when I have the baby.”

  “Do you think people are going to give you a bad time?”

  “There’ll be nothing new about that,” Red said. “I told Mrs. Hawkins. She was all right.”

  “She would be,” Karen said.

  She wanted to go on to say that she’d do anything she could to help, but it was too early in this new stage of friendship to make offers for the future. What Karen had to do now was build Red’s trust so that she could just assume Karen’s help when the time came.

  Blackie, tied to the toll booth, was hysterical at the sight of them as Red steered the car through the narrow pay lane and out onto the wide blacktop with its reassuring margin of error. Karen used the marked lanes to teach Red the finer points of steering.

  “If there had been a car in that lane,” Karen chided, “you would have taken off its fender.”

  While Red practiced, the dog continued to bark.

  “I’m going to kill that dog before I get her trained,” Red said finally.

  “That’s what I’d think about a crying baby,” Karen confessed. “Better you let that dog develop your patience.”

  Red looked at Karen and grinned. “You’re right.”

  There were two cars already lined up at the toll booth. Rat had gotten out of his and was playing with Blackie by the time Karen and Red reached the booth. In the car, his wife nursed their baby.

  “You guys ever want a baby sitter?” Red asked, looking in the window.

  “Can’t afford it,” Rat’s wife said.

  “No charge,” Red said.

  Karen was unlocking the booth and worrying that Red’s sudden interest in someone else’s baby would give away her secret. But it would give itself away quite shortly. Red should probably tell people before they could see for themselves.

  “This is going to be a fine dog,” Rat said wistfully.

  “I hope so,” Red said, struggling to untie Blackie while the dog jumped to lick Red’s face.

  “Do you know anything about babies?” Rat’s wife asked.

  “I’d like to learn,” Red said.

  Rat had taken his wallet out and was paying Karen. Then he turned back to Red before he got back into his car.

  “Who’s the lucky guy?” he asked amiably.

  “Guy?”

  “Woman starts getting interested in babies …” Rat said and shrugged.

  “Better move it,” Karen said to him. “You’ve got a lineup behind you.”

  “See you Friday,” Red said as she started back up the road, Blackie dancing at her side.

  As Karen watched her go, she wondered why she hadn’t already noticed for herself that Red was pregnant, or had her hips always been that ample? Peggy had called Karen a hypocrite when she denied that she noticed other women’s bodies. But she just didn’t. She wasn’t attracted to bodies. It had been Peggy’s confidence which had drawn Karen to her, not her undeniable good looks. But Karen had come to wonder if confidence was like make-up, something you put on as you did your public face, which wouldn’t survive an honest scrubbing. Red’s manner was as innocent as her face of the will to attract. Karen’s new interest in her body was not erotic any more than was the sight of the breast of that young nursing mother. Karen was moved by such involvement in instinctive life. Was she abnormal to feel no such desire for herself?

  Karen turned away from that question impatiently. She had had enough of internalizing the world’s judgments. She had heard Milly Forbes say having babies seemed to be a new vogue on the island. Anything Milly said could be discounted, but this outbreak of babies was like any other sort of epidemic in which people got caught not so much by instinct as by propinquity. Well, not Red. Red was as deliberately having a baby as she had made her vegetable garden.

  The dog was part of the scheme, as was learning to drive, though Karen didn’t see quite how that skill fitted in with Red’s planning if she wasn’t going to buy a car. She wasn’t a borrower.

  Abstracted as she walked down the dock to lower the ramp, Karen made only casual note of those in line for trips to the other islands. But her glimpse of Henrietta Hawkins driving off the ferry startled her out of her own musings. Henrietta’s face, despite the bright color at her throat, was as white as her hair.

  Chapter VIII

  THE LOWER HALF OF Milly’s body was like an empty sack, not only without womb but without bowels or kidneys. That empty sack filled up with pain until the nurse arrived to puncture it with a needle and the pain leaked away, only gradually to fill the empty space again. At its peak pain was her reality which only the nurse could invade, but each time it seeped away, players waiting in the wings came onto a stage of several levels where they competed for her attention. Those actors on a level with Milly were gentle with her, wiping cold sweat from her face, asking her easy, pointless questions she could ignore. On platforms off to the side and above her, the actors demanded that she take part in the drama or pass judgment on it, which she hadn’t the strength to do. Yet, when she failed them, she could follow them off their stages as if she had traveling vision, see them change out of their costumes while they complained about her as if they really were her children and not professionals at all.

  The actress playing her lost daughter Nora was the most irritating of all, throwing incomprehensible accusations at Milly like, “I didn’t run away; you did. You’re lost. Can you tell me where you really are? Can you? Then what does it mean that you don’t know where I am?”

  “But I don’t,” Milly whined, turning restlessly against the attachments which both anchored and seemed to suspend her body.

  Martin was sometimes on the first level, a face strained with concern, but more often he was up on his own platform turning it into a pulpit from which he gave pious speeches on his old theme: “Mother, your pain is tedious.”

  He had no idea what pain was, she realized, no concept at all. He seemed to her such a silly, innocent boy, standing up there mouthing his platitudes like an actor, which he was. It wasn’t really Martin up there delivering Martinish lines.

  Nor were those two on the other side really Forbes and his child bride. They didn’t take any notice of her at all, and they didn’t really do anything but gaze into each other’s eyes, but Milly was alarmed that they might. She told the nurse several times to warn them that she could see them perfectly clearly even when they went offstage, and she wouldn’t tolerate any of their sordid carryings-on.

  Then gradually the pain rose onto that busy landscape like a blinding sun until she could see nothing else. She came to welcome it and to be reluctant to have it taken from her, for without it she had to live victim to all this posturing and moralizing from people or actors or whoever they were who had no conception of what she was going through.

  “Of course we do,” the Nora one said. “We are what you are going through.”

  Bonnie, on Milly’s own level, said, “There’s nobody there, Mother. It’s the drugs they’re giving you for the pain.”

  If Nora and the others were mere hallucinations, why were they in so much sharper focus and so much more audible than Bonnie, who faded in and out like a badly tuned FM station?

&nb
sp; “This is a bit more than you bargained for, poor darling,” Henrietta said through a great deal of static. Was she addressing Milly or Bonnie?

  Then all the stages were empty, even the one by her side. Milly was alone and terrified. She did not know where she was. She wanted her watch, but she could not find it. She could hear something like the magnified beating of a heart as slow as a funeral drum, and she knew it was her own. It had been taken out of her body. Someone must have found its key and wound it up like a great clock to tell other people the time. Milly hadn’t agreed to that. They’d gutted her like a chicken, left the cavity of her body open to these swelling winds of pain which were overcoming everything, not just the irritating sorrows of her life but life itself.

  “I’m not ready!” Milly tried to cry out, but she had no voice.

  “You should get some rest now,” Henrietta said to Bonnie. “Your mother is through the crisis.”

  “For a while there I was afraid she didn’t want to live,” Bonnie said, “that she was just letting the infection take over.”

  Henrietta heard a trace of guilt in that fear. Though Bonnie was staying with her father, she obviously wouldn’t be able to talk with him about such things.

  “Would you like to go for dinner before you go home?” Henrietta suggested.

  “What about your ferry?”

  “I can stay with a friend and go back in the morning.”

  “Then yes, please.”

  Henrietta took Bonnie to a quiet little seafood restaurant which had survived the Hawkinses’ years away from town. It had been a favorite of Hart’s who, unlike most men, liked fish.

  “The first few days went so well,” Bonnie said, “and then just all of a sudden that high fever …”

  “A bit of very bad luck,” Henrietta said, handing the menu to Bonnie.

  “What has she got to live for?” Bonnie asked.

  “Why, all sorts of things!”

  “Her only real interest is hating my father,” Bonnie said gloomily. “She isn’t really interested in any of us.”

  “She wanted you here,” Henrietta reminded her.

  “Not me,” Bonnie replied. “She’s an emotional baglady, you know. She treats us all like things she’s left behind. But she doesn’t want it to look that way. So in a crisis she rummages for one of us to make herself look like a mother—to the doctors and nurses.”

  Henrietta hoped some of this anger was exhaustion and relief.

  “I shock you, don’t I?” Bonnie asked.

  “No,” Henrietta answered. “Your mother isn’t an easy woman. And she’s been very unhappy.”

  “You sound as if you think that’s over.”

  “She won’t have the energy for it for a while at least,” Henrietta said, smiling. “She might get out of the habit.”

  “I’d make more of an effort to come out and see her, but I don’t really think she wants that. Oh, she says she does, but then she behaves as if I’m there to check up on her, to spy for Dad. And I can’t really tell her Dad doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about her.”

  “He sent her roses,” Henrietta said.

  “He paid for them and for the room because I asked him to. He’s very easy to guilt-trip these days.”

  “How is it for you, staying there?” Henrietta asked.

  “Oh, it’s all right, I guess,” Bonnie said tiredly. “I don’t see any point in resenting him for being happy, but it’s a hard contrast seeing Mother the way she is. I’d never marry.”

  Henrietta thought of Red and of Karen. In her own day not marrying would have been a disgrace. No amount of evidence against marriage would have changed that. Though Henrietta had had several opportunities to marry before she accepted Hart, she still felt that old gratitude to him for her social legitimacy. She had it still even though he was no longer there to reinforce it.

  “Marriage can be a relief and a joy,” Henrietta said, but she was embarrassed by such platitudes and grateful that their dinners had arrived to distract them.

  While Bonnie retrieved clams and mussels from their shells, Henrietta could observe her at leisure. She was probably better-looking than Milly had been, but she had none of Milly’s artifice and magnetism. It wasn’t necessary to look at Bonnie though pleasant to do so. Her brown hair, indifferently cut, was clean and full of copper lights, and the color was coming back into her face with each bite of food.

  “This was such a good idea!” Bonnie said.

  “Are you in touch with your sister?” Henrietta asked. “Can you let her know about your mother?”

  Bonnie, her mouth full, shook her head.

  “Does your father know, or your brother?”

  “No. The closest I’ve come to Nora in the last years is in Mother’s hallucinations.”

  Henrietta was too tired for the amiability necessary to impose on a friend for the night. Instead she indulged in the rare luxury of a modest hotel room. She never came to town without an overnight case, so she could settle herself comfortably. The anonymity of such a room was strange to her, used as she was to the personal clutter of other people’s spare rooms, either a foldout bed in a den or a deserted child’s room prepared for visits of grandchildren. Without so much as a cast-off crossword puzzle book or a stuffed toy, the hotel room invited melodramatic speculation: call-girl murders, drug deals. It wasn’t opulent enough for such carryings-on. It could have sheltered only the less ambitious: the traveling salesman, the visiting relative not close enough kin or too modest to sleep on the living room couch, even perhaps a tourist. It was difficult for Henrietta to think of Vancouver as a tourist town even though it had recently survived Expo. It was still too much her home, though she had no intention of living here again.

  The island, perhaps because she had had to live there so long alone, seemed to belong to her in a way the city never had and never would. Most of its pleasures were now beyond her. She would never learn to go out alone at night to a film or concert. And shopping, except for Christmas, only reminded her of how much she already had that should be given away. Though she still had close friends here, the old crowd was faltering into age. Too much of the gossip was of death and dying, On the island, it was easier to be close also to the young.

  But I fail them, she mused.

  “What has she got to live for?” Bonnie had demanded.

  Henrietta should be able to explain clearly why such a question was absurd. Once you stopped thinking of life as something requiring a destiny, you could accept it as the realer miracle it was, meaning inherent in every moment of it. Humiliations and defeats could blind you for a while, but for most the healing process did take place. You woke up one morning simply glad to be alive, to be part of human consciousness. Well, all right, you finally did have to learn to die, but there was really no point in moving from the crib to the coffin, as if shunning sleep in the great bed of life would save you pain or give you power.

  The bed Henrietta lay in seemed larger and emptier than her own because it was unfamiliar. Did those widows who traveled round and round the world, teaching themselves to sleep in strange beds alone, need to learn something that was still ahead of her?

  She thought of Milly finally sleeping peacefully, the fever broken. She thought of Bonnie lying alone under the roof of her father’s new happiness, refusing such illusions for herself. And Red who had decided to tolerate no heart beating next to her own except her child’s. Henrietta would not think of her husband except as he had been all those years beside her in the kingdom of the present, which perhaps no one learned to value enough at the time.

  Her light sleep, often broken by the sudden hangings of doors, the sirens in the night streets, left her tense and restless. She got up before dawn, checked out of the hotel and drove out of the city before the morning traffic began. At sunrise, she stood on the tarmac of the ferry terminal facing west so that she could see the first light falling on the dark smudge of island lying out there twenty miles offshore. Then she went into the coffee shop for breakf
ast.

  Henrietta had just had her first sip of Styrofoam coffee and was breaking open her bran muffin when she thought she heard her name called over the public address system. It came a second time, “Mrs. Hart Hawkins.”

  Who could know she was waiting for this ferry and here an hour early? Well, almost anyone she knew would assume that, if she hadn’t made the night boat, she’d be on this one. With only two ferries each way a day, it wasn’t all that difficult to track down an islander.

  She was directed to a phone.

  “Mrs. Hawkins? I’m so glad I’ve reached you before you left. Your husband died at four this morning peacefully, in his sleep.”

  Henrietta held the phone away from her ear, stared at it and then slammed it down as she would have with any other obscene call. How dare anyone play such a dreadful trick on her!

  She hurried back to her breakfast, but it had been cleared away in her absence. She had no appetite for it now anyway. As soon as she got home, she was going to report that person, whoever he was, a grown man playing with the phone like a naughty child! If only Hart were well enough, he could handle such a thing, his calm and firmness always so reassuring. It was silly to feel as agitated as she did, as nearly violated.

  Henrietta sat in her car impatiently waiting for the ferry to unload its passengers from the islands so that she could get aboard, get across the water, get home. Once on board, she didn’t leave her car. She was first in line, could be first off. She hummed to herself, tapped the wheel, was vaguely conscious of an urgently barking dog left tied up alone on the car deck. It wasn’t kind to travel with animals.

  Henrietta couldn’t see the progress of the ferry, but she had made the trip so often she could guess quite accurately their position by the sound of the engines. There was always a high alarm like an electric sigh just before arrival at the island was announced. Then the great doors swung open, and she could see the houses in the curve of bay, the wooded hill beyond, and finally the dock itself. There was Karen, abstracted, giving her a belated sign of welcome as she drove off the boat and onto the dock.